One thing a few people will tell you about reading Moby Dick is that Melville has a lively sense of humor. However, my understanding was always that that humor ceased around page 100; the story naturally goes downhill after Queequeg jumps in the bed with Ishmael. Not so! Here I am in chapter 53 laughing hysterically at Melville's description of a nutter on board the whaleship Jeroboam who reveals his true nature as soon as the ship is just beyond the port. Here is Melville's description:
" He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from heaven by way of a trapdoor, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vestpocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, wtih that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him, but straightaway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard" (p. 217, c. 1949, Literary Guild of America).
Loving this stuff! The nutter has just pulled up to the Pequod and is addressing Ahab, so I have to scoot finish the chapter (all four pages of it). I incorrectly tend to fuse the narrator/author, but I guess the correct way to say this is that Ishmael narrates with a kind of ironic distance, and so the humor bubbles up to the surface just regularly enough. Even in the detailed footnotes.
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